The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant (93 page)

“What is the book called?” he said.

“All About Bruno,” said
Christine. “What else could it be?”

“No, that might confuse him,” said Herbert. “He knows Bruno is his own invention. The book is supposed to tell Christine how to think, little Bert. The Bruno story might be there. I don’t say it is.”

“Now who is confusing?” said Christine.

“But
is
the Bruno story inside?” said little Bert. “Look again,” he urged Christine.

She looked, or pretended to. “Bruno goes to the moon?”

“No, I know about the moon.”

“Bruno goes to an antiauthoritarian kindergarten?”

“Don’t tease him,” said Herbert.

“The kindergarten,” said little Bert. He leaned against her, out of fatigue, apparently. She might have felt pity for the fragile neck and the tired shadows around his eyes, but there were also the dirty knuckles, the bread-and-butter breath, the high insistent voice.

During the Depression the factory laid off, nobody was buying the kitchen units. I went to collect the relief, he was too ashamed. They didn’t send you checks in those days, you had to go round and see them. The other couple still came for dinner. We ate beans, sardines, peanut butter, macaroni. You could get lambs’ kidneys for twenty cents, nobody in the USA ate them. Also heart, tongue. He was laid off from February 16, 1931, to September 23, 1932. Went back part-time. I did part-time work cooking in Carol Ann’s school. She called me
“Mrs.,” would never say I was a relative. My cousin-in-law never worked, always had headaches, had to lie down a lot, never learned English. Then the factory picked up full speed, getting ready for the conflict. I fed them all through the war, stood at the electric stove, making oxtail soup on the one hand, baked squash on the other, bread and milk when my cousin had his ulcer
.

“I have something he might like to look at,” the woman in the corner said. She offered little Bert part of her collection of postcards, but he put both hands behind his back and pressed even closer to Christine. Taking no notice of him, the woman began handing the cards around clockwise, starting with Herbert. “My friends on their summer holidays,” she said. Herbert passed on the dog-eared coffee-stained views of Dubrovnik, Edinburgh, Abidjan, Pisa, Madrid, Sofia, Nice. “Very nice,” she said, encouraging Herbert. “Very nice people.”

The Norwegian looked at each card seriously, turned it over, examined the stamp, read the woman’s name and address, and tilted the card at an angle to read the message. The messages were aslant, consisted of a few words only, and ended in exclamation marks. He read aloud, “ ‘Very nice friendly people here!’ ”

The woman was smiling, handing the cards around, but her mind was elsewhere.
We never took the citizenship so we never voted. Were never interested in voting. During more than forty years we would only have voted four times anyway. Would have voted:

In 1932—for repeal
.

In 1936—against government interference and wild spending. Against a second term
.

In 1940—against wild utterances and attempts to drag the USA into the conflict on the wrong side. The President of the USA at that time was a Dutch Jew, his father a diamond cutter from Rotterdam, stole the Russian Imperial jewels after the Bolshevik revolution, had to emigrate to avoid capture and prison sentence. Within ten years they were running the whole country. Had every important public figure tied up—Walter Winchell, everybody. Their real name was Roszenfeldt
.

In 1944—against a Fourth Term. My cousin had a picture, it looked like a postcard, that showed the President behind bars. Caption said, “Fourth Term Hell!!!!!! I’m in for Life!!!!!”

Apartfrom those four times we would never have voted
.

“We are on an electric line again,” Herbert told little Bert, who could not have had the faintest idea what this meant. The child looked wilted with heat. Their conductor had opened all the windows—there seemed to be no further news about fires—but nothing could move the leaden air.

“I want it all in order,” Herbert said to Christine. “I really do intend to
write a letter. Most of the toilets are still locked—true? There isn’t a drop of drinking water. The first vendor had no ice and no paper cups. The second had nothing but powdered coffee. The third had nothing at all. All three were indifferent.”

“True,” said the woman, answering in place of Christine. She took off her black shoes and put her feet on top of them as if they were pillows.

The conductor returned to check their seat reservations for the third or fourth time. “This is only a flag stop,” he said, as their train slowed. To make it easier for him, those who were in the wrong places—Christine, the Norwegian, and little Bert—moved to where they were supposed to be. The train was now inching along past a level crossing, then gave a great groan and stopped, blocking the crossroad. The barriers must have been down for some time because a long line of traffic had formed, and some of the drivers, perspiring and scarlet, had got out to yell protests and shake their fists. The sight of grown people making fools of themselves was new to little Bert, or perhaps the comic side of it struck him for the first time; he laughed until he was breathless and had to be thumped on the back. The woman in the corner kept an apple between her teeth while she looked in her purse for the ticket. Her eyes were stretched, her mouth strained, but there was no room on the table now, not even for an apple. As for the three men—Herbert, the conductor, and the Norwegian—something about the scene on the road had set them off dreaming; the look on their faces was identical. Christine could not quite put a name to it.

The woman found her ticket and got rid of the apple.

My husband said that if the President got in for a fourth term he would jump in deep water. That was an expression they used for suicide where he came from, because they had a world-famous trout stream. Not deep, though. Where he came from everybody was too poor to buy rope, so they said the thing about jumping. That was all the saying amounted to
.

To be truthful, said Christine to herself, all three of them seem to be thinking of rape. She wondered if the victim could be the pregnant young woman—a girl really, not as old as Christine—who was running along beside the tracks, making straight for the first-class carriage. Probably not; she was unmistakably an American Army wife, and you could have counted on one hand the American wives raped by German men. There existed, in fact, a mutual antipathy, which was not the case when the sexes were reversed.
But
—here Christine imitated Herbert explaining something—we are not going to explore the attraction between German girls, famous for their
docility, and American men, perhaps unjustly celebrated for theirs. We are going to learn something more about Herbert.

Christine suddenly wondered if her lips had moved—if it was plain to anyone that her mind was speaking. At that second she noticed a fair, rosy, curly, simpering, stupid-looking child, whose bald and puffy papa kept punching the crossing barrier. Julchen Knopp was her name. Her skirt, as short as a tutu, revealed rows of ruffled lace running across her fat bottom.

They brought up the heiress Carol Ann American style—the parents were chauffeur and maid. The mother couldn’t be chauffeur because she never learned to drive. My husband was crazy about Carol Ann. He called her Shirley Temple. I called her Shirley Bimbo, but not to her face
.

At some distance from the smirking Julchen, agape with admiration but not daring to speak, stood four future conscripts of the new antiauthoritarian army: They were Dietchen Klingebiel, who later became a failed priest; Ferdinandchen Mickefett, who was to open the first chic drugstore at Wuppertal; Peter Sutitt, arrested for doping racehorses in Ireland; and Fritz Förster, who was sent to Africa to count giraffes for the United Nations and became a mercenary.

What she had just seen now was the decline of the next generation. What could prevent it? A new broom? A strong hand? The example of China? There was no limit to mediocrity, even today: The conductor had lied too easily; this was nothing like a flag stop. They had been standing still for at least seven minutes. Punctilious Herbert was far too besotted with Julchen Knopp to notice or protest. She felt an urgent need to make him pay for this, and tried to recall what it was he had said he hated most, along with the smell of food in railway compartments. As soon as they were moving again and the conductor had left off staring and gone away, she turned to the Norwegian and said, “Do please show us your yoga breathing method, and do let us hear you sing.”

“Some people imagine that yoga is a joke,” said the Norwegian. “Some others don’t care about singing.” Nevertheless he seemed willing to perform for Herbert and little Bert and the insatiable passenger in the corner. He shut the door, which instantly made the compartment a furnace, sat down where little Bert should have been, pinched his nostrils between thumb and forefinger, and produced the puffing bullfrog sounds Christine had already heard. He let his nose go and said in a normal voice, “I sing in five languages. First, a Finnish folk song, the title of which means ‘Do Not Leave,’ or ‘Stay,’
or ‘Do Not Depart.’ ” He looked at Herbert. Perhaps he knew that Herbert had been teasing Christine, calling the Norwegian “your bearded cavalier.”

The Norwegian pulled out the drop leaf at his end of the window and beat a rhythm upon it. His eyes all but vanished as he sang. His mouth was like a fish. As for Herbert, he suddenly resembled little Bert—eyes circled and tired, skin over the temples like tissue paper. She thought that he must be exhausted by the heat and by his worry over the child, and she remembered that although he hated the smell of food he had not said a word about it. The singing was tiring, finally; it filled the compartment and seemed to leave everyone short of breath. She got up and crossed to Herbert’s side, and he, with the Norwegian’s eyes fixed upon him, began stroking her arm with his fingertips, kissing her ear—things he never did in public and certainly not in front of little Bert. She sat quite still until the voice fell silent.

The woman in the corner and little Bert applauded for a long time. Herbert said, “Well. Thank you very much. That was generous of you. Yes, I think that was generous.…”

Having said what he thought, Herbert got up and left abruptly, but nobody minded. All of them, except for the woman, departed regularly in search of a drink, a conductor, or an unlocked washroom. Little Bert curled up with his face to the wall and began to breathe slowly and deeply. The Norwegian, still in little Bert’s seat, tucked his head in the corner. His hands relaxed; his mouth came open. His breathing was louder and slower than the child’s. From the corner facing his came
First the block around us got Catholic then it got black. That’s the way it usually goes. I can tell you when it got Catholic—around the time of Lend-Lease. We remained in the neighborhood because there was a Lutheran school for the child. Good school. Some Germans, some Swiss, Swedes, Norwegians, Alsatians, the odd Protestant Pole from Silesia—Rose of Sharon was one. Seven other girls were called Carol Ann—most popular name. Later Carol Ann threw the school up to us, said it was ghetto, said she had to go to speech classes at the age of twenty to learn to pronounce “th.” Much good did “th” do our little society queen—first husband a bigamist, second a rent collector. Th. Th. Th
.

This was followed by a dead silence. Herbert beckoned Christine from the corridor. She thought he wanted to stand at the window and talk and smoke, but he smiled and edged her along to one of the empty compartments at the end of their carriage. They sat down close together out of the sun and in a pleasant draft, for there was no one here who could ask them to shut the window. But then Herbert slid the door to, and undid the plushy
useless curtains held back by broad ties. The curtains were too narrow to meet and would serve only to attract attention to the compartment.

“Someone might look in,” Christine said.

“Who might?”

“Anybody going by.”

“The whole train is asleep.”

“Or if we stop at a station …”

“No scheduled stops. You know we’ve been rerouted.”

It reminded her of the joke about Lenin saying, “Stop worrying, the train’s sealed!” She wondered if this was a good time to tell it.

Herbert said, “Now that we’re alone, tell me something.”

“What?”

“Isn’t it a bit of a pose, your reading? Why did you say you were reading for an exam?”

“I didn’t say it was my exam,” she said.

“You said that it was in two days’ time.”

“Yes. Well, I imagine that will be for students of theology who have failed their year.”

“Of course,” said Herbert. “That accounts for the Bonhoeffer. Well. Our Little Christian. What good does it do him if
you
read?”

“It may do me good, and what is good for me is good for both of you. Isn’t that so?” For the second time that day her vision was shaken by tears.

“Chris.”

“I do love you,” she said. “But there has been too much interference.”

“What, poor little Bert?” No, she had not meant interference of that kind. “You mean from
him
, then?” Sometimes Herbert tried to find out how much she lied to her official fiancé and whether she felt the least guilt. “What did you tell him about Paris?” he said.

“Nothing. It’s got nothing to do with him.”

“Does he think you love him?” said Herbert, blotting up her tears as though she were little Bert.

“I think that I could live with him,” said Christine. “Perhaps there is more to living than what I have with you.” She was annoyed because he was doing exactly what her fiancé always did—veering off into talk and analysis.

“It is easy to love two people at once,” said Herbert, more sure of her than ever now. “But it can be a habit, a pattern of living; before it becomes too much a habit you ought to choose.” He had seen the theology student
and did not take him seriously as a rival. She glanced out to the empty corridor. “Don’t look there,” said Herbert.